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Excerpt from Value and Distribution: A Critical and Constructive Study Were it ever important to decide in what degree, if at all, a writer may claim priority in the development of doctrine, the task would be a peculiarly difficult one in the case of the present book. The truth, however, rather than any personal ascription of it being the important matter, it becomes worth while to reflect that for several decades and, indeed, in the main since the time of Adam Smith, economic theory has been in possession of doctrines enough for a reasonably complete, consistent, and logical system of thought - if only these doctrines had been, with a wise eclecticism, properly combined and articulated. The emphasis in the present volume upon the entrepreneur point of view in the computation of costs and in the analysis of the process by which distributive shares are assigned, has nothing new in it; it was necessary only that the point of view be clearly distinguished, consistently held, and fully developed. The present writer has emphasized opportunity cost; but this doctrine is everywhere implied in economic discussion; the marvel is that it has been there only unconsciously or half consciously. As far as the present writer is informed, D. I. Green was the first to formulate the doctrine in entire definiteness - the present writer the first to give it systematic application. To making precise the concept of profit and to elucidating the relations of profit to cost some contribution has perhaps been made in the present book. The insistence that rent is a part of cost of production, in full parallel with other outlays, follows necessarily from the acceptance of the entrepreneur point of view; the doctrine is as old as entrepreneurship. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.